I think that for me writing books is like reporting on a journey, trying to conjure up the places one has travelled through. You can go there yet still not recognise the places from my description. Others may describe them too but that won't mean they are the same places. Anyone who finds the same places inside him or herself will render my description useless. My real ambition is to find the right kind of accomplices with which to people these places. If ever I were to feel for certain that these places exist in their own right, I would immediately stop writing. For that would mean my friends and I were the inhabitants of that region: we would practice its customs.¹

There are two reasons for deciding to begin these marginalia on Cerith Wyn Evans's work with a quote from Pierre Klossowski: the first is about following a trail that the artist has himself laid in his work. In answer to a question about his favourite unrealised project, Wyn Evans once replied: 'High up above the city, in amongst the countless lights, I would like to put flashing lights (like the ones on airplanes) on the highest building. These would then transmit Pierre Klossowski's novel Le Baphomet into the night in Morse code.'² The second reason is that, structurally, this approach matches a method which seems to be characteristic of Cerith Wyn Evans's own work: the citing of fragments, not as independent particles torn from their original context in order to be incorporated into a new one, but on the contrary, as the smallest possible reference which will bring to mind a whole horizon. In this respect the business of making references only corresponds outwardly to citation in the usual sense: what appears to be a fragment is in fact the tip of an iceberg, perhaps even the iceberg itself. So when only a few lines by Klossowski are cited, these lines stand not only for the notion of a phantasmatic place and for the hope of accomplices and the wish for a community, but they stand too for the whole of Klossowski - in other words for a way of thinking that might correspond to Klossowski's. The impossibility of this undertaking expresses all the more clearly the desire that is the stuff of our present discussion.

In opening with a passage by Klossowski my intention is also to paint in a horizon that has its origins not in the work of Wyn Evans but which in fact preceded it. An awareness of 'forerunners', of mediated origins - that is to say, origins which are not the artist's own - seems to me to be a constitutive part of any serious engagement with Wyn Evans's work. This brings us to our first conjecture, and we are only going to be discussing conjectures here: namely that Cerith Wyn Evans's works do not owe their existence to their author, for their origins pre-date their making. In light of this, the raison d'être for the works under discussion will not be found in the author, for the author has been compelled by those earlier origins to set to work and to set out towards his own function as an author. In other words: one is not born an author, one becomes an author. Which suggests that authorship is a paradoxical product in the sense that it is preceded by its own end-result. It is only through one's account of origins that are not one's own that these become one's own (i.e. that one appropriates them). So authorship is a form of finding one's feet post factum. Oedipus Rex and the story of patricide is all about just this.

A memory: in his film Firework Text (Pasolini), 1998, Cerith Wyn Evans has a construction put up on the beach displaying a text which consists of 'quotations' from Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus Rex

(1967): 'On the banks of the Livenza / silvery willows are growing / in wild profusion, their boughs / dipping into the drifting waters.' These lines describe the landscape Pasolini knew as a child, however - in Wyn Evans's presentation of them - only until they go up in flames, letter by letter, and finally disappear into the darkness of the night in the flash of an explosion. The way that film not only evolves a narrative from the relationship between light and darkness, but also forms the technical basis of the medium of film, already points to the fact that, for Wyn Evans, film is more than just a medium; but more of that later.

This brings us to our second conjecture: Cerith Wyn Evans presents the notion of the 'author' as being a product rather than primarily an originator. This product is the result of a selective filter process which allows one to evaluate, to repeat, to negate, to contradict and to adopt a position of one's own. During the course of this process the spotlight is turned on the origins and their fathers. While it was Pier Paolo Pasolini in the film Firework Text, in the installation of has the film already started? (2000) it is Marcel Broodthaers, amongst others, who returns via a quotation of his own potted palms. The deployment of these shifts characterises the product (that one anticipates and post factum reconstructs) as performative by nature. It hardly need be said that authorship as a performative product is permanently resistant to finalisation. Its origins are too heterogeneous and contingent, its ramifications are too complex to be readily 'available' or even surmountable. Klossowski states: 'You can go there and still not recognise the places from my description. Others may describe them too but that won't mean they are the same places.'³ When Wyn Evans cites Broodthaers's potted palms, or lines from Pasolini, then we can go there but without recognising the places from his description. On the one hand, all of Broodthaers is not present in this quotation; on the other hand, the quotation liberates itself from its source and in turn becomes a piece that goes beyond Broodthaers - thereby ceasing to be a quotation. In this shifting and changing it becomes clear that the verbalisation of origins need not necessarily be intended as historical discourse, nor as history in the sense of histoire, but rather as a story in the sense of a tale, even in the sense of a myth. And myths have no authors; myths are unfathomable sources.

Given that we suggested a moment ago that the origins of Wyn Evans's works precede their author, then it follows that these works are not merely the product of their author, but that the latter is also a product of the works that he makes and that make him. During the process of the production, the products produce their producer. And now for our third conjecture: with his plentiful quotations and references, Wyn Evans is not simply pointing to the origins that preceded him, and consequently to a dependency relationship, or rather, he is not pointing to a certain context as an unavoidable framework, but by appropriating these he is also articulating a potential for appropriation that is always an intrinsic part of any work. Perhaps the notion of the potential for appropriation is too vague, and even an inept choice here, for the real point is not appropriation, but in rather more circumspect and at the same time more complicated terms, it is about reading and the implicit translation which ensues from that reading. What Wyn Evans is producing with his 'quotations' are in fact translations. And with Walter Benjamin's essay on 'The Task of the Translator' in mind, the translation does not aim to convey the original but to lay bare its very language.⁴ In other words: in the translation the original is liberated from its author. In the translation the original is no longer seen solely as the product of its author, but as a source. It may perhaps seem paradoxical that it is only in the translation, which imbues a work with the status of an original and hence of a source, that the original author is properly valued. For the translation serves two masters: it pays tribute as much to the original as to its author in that it gingerly separates the two, liberating them from one another. Now the author is more than simply the producer of the original which is in turn more than just an author's musings. It seems to me that when we read Wyn Evans's 'translations' we should be alert to this duality: the interest in the original object as well as the tribute paid to the original and its author. Perhaps the notion of 'tribute' is overly sentimental, but there does seem to be an element of paying tribute, or at least of gratitude, in the way that the figures Wyn Evans introduces are always greeted with the warmest of receptions and never cast in a critical light.

Klossowski talks of finding 'the right kind of accomplices',⁵ and Wyn Evans's quotations and translations are also pointing to the same thing. It may be a banal thought or somewhat unproductive on a theoretical level, but let us for a moment imagine the authors that Wyn Evans identifies with his quotations - Klossowski, Pasolini, Broodthaers, William Burroughs, Guy Debord, Brion Gysin and many more. Let us imagine them as large as life, congregating as they do in Wyn Evans's works. We would have before us a group of people who would certainly get on well and who no doubt would have relished talking and laughing together had history but allowed it. Through Wyn Evans they become accomplices, his accomplices. Having mentioned patricide a moment ago, we now find ourselves at a zombie ball, or no, in the realms of Sigmund Freud's uncanny - 'for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.'⁶ And our earlier reference to the fact that Wyn Evans is not recounting some form of histoire should be adjusted in the sense that he is at least criticising history as a 'process of repression', not simply by presenting a historical juxtaposition of what could always have been imagined together in any case - even if Historia did not want it - but also by evoking a presence and a simultaneity that embraces the historically heterogeneous and disparate. Which in itself is another task for the translator: to articulate the trans-historical in the present.

And that brings us to the fourth conjecture: if authorship in Wyn Evans's case can be categorised as translation, then this correlation between author and translator must in turn effect our notion of the subject. For this subject is not only expressed through the process of translation but in practice also becomes a translated subject, in other words: a represented subject and a subject of representation.

From a psychoanalytic point of view the subject is positioned in a field of vision in which it does not just see but is also seen, or, as Lacan says, it is 'photo-graphed'.⁷This link between seeing and being seen forms a central, or rather, a consistent motif in Wyn Evans's work. This moment, in which the subject recognises itself in the picture as 'the seen' and thus as a signifier, is described in psychoanalysis as 'suture'. Jacques-Alain Miller defines suture as 'that moment when the subject inserts itself into the symbolic register in the guise of a signifier, and in so doing gains meaning at the expense of being.'⁸ Furthermore, Miller claims that 'suture names the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse ... it figures there as the element which is lacking, in the form of a stand-in.'⁹ And further still, Silverman writes: '...signifier stands in for the absent subject (i.e. absent in being) whose lack it can never stop signifying.'¹⁰ Having described Wyn Evans as an author whose work is preceded by its origins, and having then drawn the analogy between author and translator - whose intention is always to separate the original from its author - we now find ourselves faced with the author as a signifier, standing in for an 'absent subject'. In other words: Cerith Wyn Evans becomes an author whose work is based on a deficit, on an absent subject, taking its place as a signifier. Wyn Evans thus formulates a notion of the subject that knows of its own actual deficiency, of a void within itself, and which exploits this void in the matter of openly sewing together different references, thereby generating the imago of a subject or author. This sewing together of an imago should not, however, be regarded as a form of postmodern pastiche, but as an existential necessity, perhaps even as an obsession: '...it can never stop...'

What we have defined here as the imago of an author or a subject, Klossowski has described elsewhere as a simulacrum 'corresponding to an irresistible compulsion'.¹¹ Klossowski: 'Every making of a simulacrum presupposes the dominance of stereotypes which have already established themselves, for it deconstructs them solely in order to construct itself so that it may in the end carve out a place for itself as a new stereotype.'¹² In order to understand what Klossowski means by stereotypes, perhaps we should recall the way that Marcel Broodthaers was 'reduced' to a quotation in the shape of a potted palm. Potted palms of this kind - as a readily available, institutional stereotype standing for Broodthaers - are not only found in Wyn Evans's work but also in that of other artists, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija for one. 'In the field of communication (be it literary or visual) the stereotype (as a 'style') is the residue of a simulacrum (corresponding to an irresistible compulsion), which has sunk to the level of common currency, has been widely disseminated and is exposed to a generalised interpretation ... Here the stereotype reveals its capacity for mysteriously obfuscating interpretation. So, in view of this, how does a "science of stereotypes" proceed? It is a matter of highlighting to an excessive degree - to the point of inadequacy - the character of the stereotype as a contrived replica of the mysteriously obfuscating phantasm. And, by this means, the stereotype succeeds in conducting a critique of its own obfuscating interpretation.'sup>13 And now the fifth conjecture: in his work Cerith Wyn Evans is in fact practicing a science of stereotypes. But not for the sake of retrieving contents that have gone missing in the 'sedimentation of representation',¹⁴ but rather to shed light on the stereotypical, per se, and hence on the simulacrum. In fact Klossowski's demands and Wyn Evans's work match to such an extent that one might be forgiven for imagining that Wyn Evans had been invented by Klossowski. The only counter-argument would be that this would mean constructing two stereotypes at the expense of the simulacrum. But there is another way to elucidate this relationship between stereotype and simulacrum which we hinted at earlier on: and this way takes us to film.

Just a reminder: Cerith Wyn Evans had already made a reputation for himself in film in the 1980s before the art world had discovered him, even if his films in those days already did contain a great deal of what is regarded today as artistic praxis. Wyn Evans was well aware that he was 'grafting together' art and film: 'My first films were "sculptures", they documented stages - theatrical stages for instance - places that are conceived for particular forms of action. These were accompanied by interchangeable soundtracks.'¹⁵ And while Wyn Evans is now regarded as an artist, his works are never without some connection to the world of film. Clearly there is a significance in the very title of the work already referred to here, has the film already started?. And what do we see? A white helium balloon rising up out of the Broodthaers potted palms. The balloon brings to mind thoughts of a full moon above a miniature landscape, but at the same time it also serves as a curved screen for a film projection. However, the circular projected image is just a fraction larger than the balloon and it throws a positively cosmological image of light and shadow onto the wall behind, reminiscent of an eclipse of the sun or the moon with the accompanying corona. The film we are looking at makes us wonder: has the film already started? What is being projected as a 'film' reminds us of what we see when we look into the lens of a film projector. Particles of dust flying about and grainy light - as though one were reminding the film of what it actually is: a light-projection independent of the story that is being told. The illegibility of this film might also be described as the film's own blind spot, in which the latter, the film per se, becomes perceptible. Wyn Evans would not be a translator if there were not in fact another film behind this projection, an original pre-dating his translation. In this case it is Gil Wolman's film L'Anti-Concept.¹⁶ Wyn Evans has 'replaced' the original soundtrack with a sound collage containing, amongst other things, quotations from William Boroughs and from Jean Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema, as well as an assortment of musical motifs. On the one hand this chain of references could tempt us into endless hermeneutic interpretations, only to find ourselves tangled in a cluster of rhizomes at some point. On the other hand, however, we could concentrate on the question of the relationship of stereotype and simulacrum, or better still on how it is that Wyn Evans manages to present such unremitting ambiguity in the way the two relate. Just when the film can only be recognised as such by its intrinsic nature it turns from film stereotype into film simulacrum, into an active image-producing medium. Yet as we engage with the simulacrum we are redirected back to the stereotypical quality of the film. Which makes sense of the reference to Broodthaers, for after all he was the one who confronted art institutions with their own stereotypes and then proceeded to re-construct a simulacrum from these.

The presence of film as a stereotypical element in our perception goes so far that in his subtitle series Wyn Evans just needs to put the words 'meanwhile ... across town' on the wall (laid out like a subtitle in a film) to evoke the notion of film, even in the face of its absence. When the words are laid out in the manner of the stereotypical subtitle, the film appears as a simulacrum even when it looks like everyday reality.

And that brings us to our sixth and last conjecture, namely that Wyn Evans sets about portraying both reality and himself simply as a 'tableau'. The notion of the tableau or the picture played a crucial part in the thinking of Lacan and Klossowski alike. Lacan: 'I must, to begin with, insist on the following: in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture [tableau] ... What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects.'¹⁷ And Klossowski: 'A described scene and the same scene as a tableau constitute two modes of perception that are as different from one another as their actual object seems to be the same. [...] But the tableau neither comments on details nor lists them because it grasps them in a single glance - either as they connect with or oppose each other - with the result that these details, in all the various parts of the tableau, are all the more effective in their circumscription of the silence generated by the absence of commentary, which is itself kept at bay.'¹⁸ This evening, Cerith...

Translated by Fiona Elliott

— Andreas Spiegl